THE DISMAL SCIENCE

     Many years ago, about 10 years BTM, before Trump mistake, I was watching the Dylan Rattigan show on MSNBC. I liked his show because he discussed economics, a science that most of us incompletely understand, which is why republicans can get us to believe such crazy stuff as the Laffer Curve and Trickle-down economics. Rattigan's guest on this day was a fellow who billed himself as a "stand-up economist". He was at the time a Professor of Economics at Reed College. Clearly not Harvard or some other fancy-pants university, but anytime somebody can find humor in what is called, "the dismal science", they have my attention. He had a pretty good shtick. He was able to explain such economic models as Keynesianism, Free-market economics, and other issues, while finding the humor most of us would miss. Before I get too far here, have you considered the irony that an economist could be funny? Have you ever listened to Allan Greenspan try to explain irrational exuberance? Is there an explanation? A funny economist is as rare as a joke told in American Sign Language. Economists are very smart people with a lot of words at their command, but whose depth of emotional understanding is measured in angstroms.

     I have done some reading on the subject of economics over my adult life, starting with John Kenneth Galbraith on the Great Depression, which I read back in the 80s. I can't say for sure I understood it, but I at least understand the history of the events leading up to it, and possibly how FDR was able to bring us out of the Depression. I still don't understand why it was so "great". In recent years the concept of great has been even more baffling. And by the way, why was the recession not called the Great Recession? Questions. Later I read Marx and Engles, Capital. I still can't say with confidence whether capital is spelled with an 'A' or an 'O'. My memory of Marx's recommendations for better treatment of industrial workers makes pretty good sense to me. Unions have made improvements in workers lives, which lead to more personal enrichment. Maybe I am a socialist, at least I can live with it. It was about this time, mid-Reagan era, that I started to ask what happened to that thing in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence that promise, "government by the consent of the governed. I had always believed that applied to all of us that aren't office-holders, at least north of the Mason-Dixon line. The problem as I saw it, was that one party was trying very hard to take that governance away from people who weren't part of what in other countries is called "the ruling class". No, I wasn't  exceptionally perceptive, it was that I suspected that a bell-shaped curve such as the Laffer curve wasn't a perfectly symmetrical shape, and other examples of Republican bullshit. Without sounding like a conspiracist, when it seems to be a pattern before you, someone probably designed it. I have said earlier that these concepts are extremely difficult, perhaps more difficult than folding a fitted sheet. There were just things that didn't quite fit, didn't add up. Why, for instance,was Milton Friedman awarded a Nobel Prize for Economics? The same Milton Friedman that had been so helpful to the young Chilean economists that had slithered in when General Pinochet elevated himself above his military grade and started disappearing people. What does Libertarian mean? Is it just a ruse? What makes Objectivism objective? Why isn't it a verb? Later, as the new millennium dawned, I read a book by a French economist, Thomas Piketty, who wrote a book, Capital in the 21st Century. Finally I saw how to spell Capital. It was about the size of two volumes of War and Peace bound together. You must be pretty interested in economics to attempt that kind of read. "Just a minute dear, I'm almost finished with this chapter". It was filled with graphs, and pie-charts, and bar charts. This was clearly more interesting than the boring old Marx and Engle that it sought to update. There are some You-Tube videos of Piketty and I heartily recommend them.

     One day while walking through the library in about four years BTM, I spyed a book by Freiderich Hyack called provocatively, The Road to Serfdom. This was one of the Gods of Free-market economics. Ron Paul, father of Rand and the better of the two, probably had it leather-bound with everything Hyack said in red. When I had finished the book my initial thought was, "this is ripe for satire". I did not choose to read its companion, by his cousin Ludwig Mises. Michelle Bachman's excitement to have it for summer reading was not an inducement. The title was less interesting, something like, Human Action, a treatise on economics. This is a title that would be created by a person who would describe the illness of a child that is bankrupting a family, a "liquidity crisis". The Road to Serfdom was written on the premise that business is strangled by regulation and taxation. That the inexorable result was reducing the businessman to a mere serf. This was written in the middle of the Depression, 1936. So, a couple things here: 

1) the business owner would be analogous to the landowner in the age of serfs. Today we would call them the aristocracy.

2) The landowner, usually a Duke or Baron or some other well-placed friend of the monarchy, gives the serf a tiny share of the produce for his family to live on and takes the rest to the bank.

3) serfs were born and died on the property. They could not travel between jobs. The could, I suppose be given by one landowner to another.

4) If the landowner were so unfortunate as to lose his fortune to gambling debts, prostitution, or other activities of people with power, he can, "marry-up". There was no Road to Serfdom for the higher classes.

5) Ironically, the plague killed off a third of Europeans around 1350. It was very democratic, small 'd', exacting the same chance of infection to the landowner and the serf. Some landowners fled their property for a different climate, thus spreading it world-wide. Some people had an immunity to Bubonic Plague. If those fortunate few happened to be serfs on abandoned land, they could keep the product of their labor until the aristocrats worthless relatives returned. Bakers, tanners, candle-makers, shoemaker, and other trades sprang up. This infusion of cash in the village quickly worked its way through the village, benefitting other producers of goods. When that wealth went to thearistocrats,it benefitted a tiny few, bankers, brothels, and gambling dens.

6) By my estimation, this would be the freeing of markets. But I am wrong.

     Things just don't add up. My socialism has hijacked my senses. The Republican says that there are makers and takers. The people who make the stuff don't get to call themselves makers. The people who sit in the corner offices are the makers. Meantime the rates on wealth are much less than the taxes on most people, the takers. They are too sneaky to just give the campaign-giving class a lower tax-rate, they give them write-offs and other inducements that reduce their effective tax rate. Meanwhile, the great middle-class that came to fruition post WWII, and made our country an economic powerhouse, was finding itself without union jobs, manufacturing was shipped to cheaper counties without regulations that protected the environment and the workers. In short, that middle-class was on that road to Serfdom. A greeter at Walmart was in their future.

     While the middle-class was losing its economic share, corporate executives were expanding their share. This started about the time of Jack Welch, former head of General Electric, and coincidentally, about the time of Golden Parachutes for the corporate aristocracy. In 1970 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, corporate executives made about 50 times mean worker pay. By the end of the millennium, corporate executives earned north of 350 times mean worker pay. This was less than a generation after the vaunted trickle-down was supposed to trickle down. And we haven't even talked about corporate bonuses. Meanwhile, taxes for top corporations and wealthy Americans had been reduced, regularly. Every time congress had a receptive president or a veto-proof majority. President Clinton managed to get the tax-rate to the 39% that had been in place when Reagan took office. But that was reduced again with the republican congress in 2002. Even worse, funding for the IRS had been slashed. The result, tax inspectors had to work too hard to bring charges on high-level tax evaders like Donald Trump. So they went after the easy game, working people.

     Economic science is as big an oxymoron as Creation Science.